Google Translate on the job
Some time ago I grabbed this link to write about: Google Translate Asks You to “Suggest a Better Translation.” In a nod to the idea that no, computers aren’t really good at this human language thing, the folks at Google have taken the most business-savvy Web 2.0 step possible: make the users improve your product for you! You don’t have to pay actual translators to vet your output, and as a bonus you can serve ads to the eyeballs of everyone involved in the process.
The news this morning featured plenty of amused commentary on the signs Cubs fans were holding up to cheer on Fukudome Kosuke as he almost hit for the cycle. Asiajin has a nice explanation of what happened here: Google Translate tricked Cubs fans thoughtlessly. It turns out that Google’s toy could have used a bit of that user improvement before someone grabbed the Japanese rendering of “It’s gonna happen” there, which was for some reason 偶然だぞ. Telling your team’s guy “you just got lucky that time” isn’t the greatest thing to do when his bat is just about the only thing standing between you and defeat. Which you suffer anyway. Then again it is the Cubs we’re talking about here.
Update: Commenter Adam Rice has written this post about the Google thing, which, as he notes, promises “perhaps a huge jump forward in improvement over older MT systems . . . but perhaps a huge clusterfuck of unharmonized spammy nonsense.”
One Response to “Google Translate on the job”
04/03/2008
I blogged about that “suggest a better translation” dingus a while ago myself. I’m very curious what happens at the back-end to those suggestions. So far, neither of the Google people I’ve asked have been able to tell me anything about it.
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